Gibson To Make Shoah Series By Zeddy Lawrence - Wednesday 7th of December 2005
Mel Gibson found himself courting controversy once again this week as it emerged the Oscar winner was working on a television series about the Shoah.
The star's 2004 movie, The Passion of the Christ, was slated as anti-Semitic.
Based on the memoirs of Flory Van Beek – a Dutch Jew hidden by her neighbours from the Nazis – the project has been commissioned by American television network ABC.
The series will be made by the Braveheart director’s production company, but he is not expected to appear in it, and it has not yet been confirmed how much involvement he will actually have in producing it.
However, as well as the outrage sparked by The Passion, the debate over his attachment to the project has been exacerbated by comments reportedly made by his father questioning the extent of the Shoah.
During an interview on a New York radio station last year, Hutton Gibson said: ““The Holocaust is all - maybe not all fiction - but most of it is. For instance the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz would not do the job.”
Referring to critics who have already questioned the wisdom of the series, Quinn Taylor from ABC told Variety “I would tell them to shut up and wait to see the movie, and then judge."